Successor to Claude Levi-Strauss at the College de France, Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture - as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth - is often seen as essentially different than nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the "four ontologies" - animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism - to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh.

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Beyond Nature and Culture

This study discusses the meaning of Amerindian "perspectivism": the ideas in Amazonian cosmologies concerning the way in which humans, animals, and spirits see both themselves and other world beings. Such ideas suggest the possibility of a redefinition of the classical categories of "nature", "culture", and "supernature" based on the concept of perspective or point of view. The study argues in particular that the antinomy between two characterizations of indigenous thought - on the one hand "ethnocentrism", which would deny the attributes of humanity to humans from other groups, and on the other hand "animism", which would extend such qualities to beings from other species - can be resolved if one considers the difference between the spiritual and corporal aspects of beings.

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Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio

Sur la base d'un materiel ethnographique recueilli chez les Wari' (Rondonia, Bresil), cet article remet en question quelques-uns des presupposes de la litterature anthropologique contemporaine concernant les conceptions indigenes du corps, en etudiant une composante essentielle de la corporalite des peuples amazoniens, peu evoquee dans les etudes ethnographiques de l'Amazonie: son caractere instable et transformationnel. Cette dimension n'apparait que lorsque l'analyse suppose un elargissement de la notion d'humanite (signalee pour la premiere fois a notre attention par Levy-Bruhl et Leenhardt, entre autres) qui inclurait non seulement les etres que nous considerons comme humains, mais aussi d'autres entites subjectives telles que les animaux et les esprits. L'elaboration de cette problematique est centree sur la discussion des relations entre le corps et l'âme, entre humanite et corporalite.

Chronically unstable bodies: reflections on amazonian corporalities

This article analyses the process of producing kinship among various Amazonian peoples, focusing primarily on the Wari', a Txapakura-speaking people living in Western Amazonia (Brazil). It argues that the production of kin cannot be related exclusively to the domestic or intra-tribal domain, since kinship emerges through a constant dialogue with non-human entities. By examining the significance of alimentary taboos associated with couvade practices in a number of groups, it shows that the new-born is made human by means of the production of its body as a human body in contraposition to animal bodies. ... [la naissance] n'est pas la simple addition d'individu supplementaraire a telle ou telle famille, mais une cause de desequilibre entre le monde des hommes et l'univers de puissances invisibles... (Clastres 1972: 12) During the same period in which anthropology debated the relationship between the 'biological facts' of reproduction and the socially recognized ties of kinship through the works of Durkheim, Malinowski, Rivers, and later Radcliffe-Brown (an enduring dichotomy according to Schneider 1984: 193), Levy-Bruhl - exploring the phenomenon of primitive participation - noted with some surprise that in the most varied ethnographic regions, procreation was no assurance of kinship with the child. This was not because paternity or even maternity - could not be recognized, an important issue in theoretical discussions at the time, but because the child born to a woman could still be reckoned to be non-human: the child of an animal. Levy-Bruhl was not referring to mythic episodes in which such cases were abundant, but to the facts of quotidian life: 'The idea that a child of normal appearance may nevertheless not be "human" is a familiar one to the primitives' (Levy-Bruhl

Making kin out of others in amazonia

A problem of particular concern in the literature on animistic systems is the status of hunting and food consumption in societies whose ontology is not founded upon a distinction between humans and animals. If animals are people, how can one distinguish between everyday eating and cannibalism? Commensality is a vector for producing kinship among humans, a mechanism which depends on the transformation of the animal prey into an object devoid of intentionality. Indigenous techniques for desubjectivizing prey are based on a specific conception of the person that is not reducible to a simple body‐and‐soul dualism. A new theoretical formulation for this partibility sheds light on warfare and funerary anthropophagy in Amazonia.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/518298

E.B Viveiros de Castro

Papers

A construcao da pessoa nas sociedades indigenas brasileiras